Race and Gun Control

David Frum quotes Rod’s recent blog post on gun crime in Baton Rouge in an op-ed for CNN entitled “America’s gun problem is not a race problem.” He doesn’t like the idea of dividing Americans into groups based on their disproportionate rates of gun crime:

The price of redefining gun violence as an issue pertaining only to “those people” — of casting and recasting the gun statistics to make them less grisly if only “those people” are toted under some different heading in some different ledger — the price of that redefinition is to lose our ability to think about the problem at all.

There’s a bit of a problem here. The post he quotes from was about the difficult, fraught question of whether it’s racist or merely realistic or both to avoid certain dangerous places in Louisiana where most crimes tend to be committed by black men. Rod wasn’t talking about gun policy, nor was he suggesting that gun crime is exclusively a black problem, as Frum seems to suggest. One of his tweets even suggests he knows he’s reaching a bit–Frum says it’s an instance of when one of the “leading” gun control arguments “peeks out.”

Frum favors stronger federal gun laws, Rod is skeptical of their efficacy, and that’s what this is really about. He adds:

… fears of being victimized by violence explain why so many white Americans — especially older and more conservative white Americans — insist on the right to bear arms in self-protection. They see gun violence as something that impinges on them from the outside. They don’t blame guns for gun violence. They blame a particular subset of the population. And they don’t see why they should lose their right because some subset of the population abuses theirs.

What might the fleshed-out version of this argument be? You know, not “peeking,” but fully emerged? That white conservatives oppose gun control because they view their AR-15s and high capacity magazines as a defense against black violence? There are probably some people who think that way, but it’s a mentality more in line with the most reactionary white South Africans than your average American gun owner.

Frum is abstract but gun violence isn’t always just “something that impinges on them from outside.” For a store clerk in Hollywood on Tuesday, the outside sure impinged pretty close. Moreover wouldn’t anyone living in a violent neighborhood, black or white, think along similar lines?

Leaving aside race, most people agree that some people abusing their rights isn’t grounds to deny them to others. Most people also believe in equality under the law. Frum is suggesting that at a certain point–once the murder rate hits a given number or one too many mass shootings have taken place–collective responsibility demands some limitation on everyone’s rights because some just can’t act civilly. From a conservative standpoint, that’s justifiable. I’d only say it’s the logic of the TSA, not the Bill of Rights.

Yet Frum’s concern about the politics of division is a worthy sentiment. So in that spirit let’s take that paragraph and see how it holds up, reversed:

fears of being victimized by gun confiscation explain why so many black Americans — especially younger and more radical black Americans — insist on the right to bear arms in self-protection. They see gun control as something that impinges on them from the outside.

That was once the view of the Black Panthers. I’m reminded of this book on the early history of gun control, and how in the 20th century many gun regulations were aimed at disempowering black radicals. From Thaddeus Russell’s review in Reason:

In 1967 Don Mulford, the Republican state assemblyman who represented the Panthers’ patrol zone and who had once famously denounced the Free Speech Movement and anti-war demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley, introduced a bill inspired by the Panthers that prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms, open and concealed. As Winkler puts it, the text of what became the Mulford Act “all but pointed a finger at the Panthers when it said, ‘The State of California has witnessed, in recent years, the increasing incidence of organized groups and individuals publicly arming themselves for purposes inimical to the peace and safety of the people of California.’ ” The law made California the first state to ban the open carrying of loaded firearms. …

Although contemporary gun control moralists such as Michael Moore portray their cause as being on the right side of history, Gunfight establishes that the first gun control organizations in the United States were the posses that terrorized freed slaves after the Civil War. Many freedmen came into possession of guns that were confiscated from former masters and Confederate soldiers. But organizations with names like the Men of Justice, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Knights of the Rising Sun roamed on horseback across the South, shooting, hanging, and disarming blacks. “The most infamous of these,” Winkler reports, “was the Ku Klux Klan.”

To the Black Panthers, gun control was just another way racist governments disempowered them and their communities.

That’s not to say they were correct, or that their experience is analogous to today. It is to say that the terrain of the gun debate has shifted and is ever-shifting, along racial lines and others. And with all his talk about fearful whites clinging to their guns and racial resentment–or resentment against “a particular subset,” as if we don’t know who he means–it seems like Frum is the one drawing racial lines to support his political position.

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13 Responses to Race and Gun Control

Mr. Bloom said:
“That white conservatives oppose gun control because they view their AR-15s and high capacity magazines as a defense against black violence? There are probably some people who think that way, but it’s a mentality more in line with most reactionary white South Africans than your average American gun owner.”

I’m not so sure that this statement is correct. If you spend anytime in the gun world, especially at Gun Shows, there seems to be two underlying themes to AR-15 purchasers: The need for protection from a tyrannical government and a need for protection “when the shit hits the fan.” While the first is clearly delusional given the pervasiveness and power of our police and intelligence complex, the second scenario is where race plays an important role. While it is not always expressed overtly, the message of societal breakdown is deeply rooted in fears of race wars and hordes of blacks running amok. The concomitant Zombie Apocalypse theme hides and packages the race war theory in a palatable fun package.

These shows have come along way from 20 years ago, when the Klan and other White Power movements sold blatantly racist items, but it did not disappear. The white man’s fear is still there, it’s just been packaged better.

That’s not to say the Panthers were wrong; either…. Considering the state of race relations in the US; who could blame them?
“Frum is suggesting that at a certain point–once the murder rate hits a given number or one too many mass shootings have taken place–collective responsibility demands some limitation on everyone’s rights because some just can’t act civilly. From a conservative standpoint, that’s justifiable”

“While it is not always expressed overtly, the message of societal breakdown is deeply rooted in fears of race wars and hordes of blacks running amok.”

I don’t know about the “deeply rooted” part, but from the assault-type rifle owners one does frequently hear references to the L.A. riots of 1992 especially, and the open and blatant abandonment of parts of the city by the police.

Steve Sailer at iSteve.com explains the interaction of race and gun control fairly succinctly. And because the issue of gun control involves race the issue gets very complicated and not easy to discuss. White people living in more rural areas with limited police presence and long response times approve of guns as a form of self protection, as well as hunting, etc. White people in urban areas that have a heavy police presence and short response times do not feel the need for guns for self protection. They would rather have the police provide the protection. What can’t be discussed is the need for protection from whom. And the answer to that is protection from minorities with guns. So we have the kabuki dance of white liberals calling for gun control to protect them from white rednecks whom they never encounter.

Frum is dishonest when he thinks race is not the major reason for America’s gun violence. Living in upper northwest Washington, Frum knows enough that few DC gun murders are not black on black. DC will go a whole year without a white committing a murder with a gun. Frum knows this even if he never travels to the other side of DC, Anacostia, which is a whole different world entirely.

In the end, the argument over guns is a cultural one. Urbanites like Frum are beyond the use of guns and are alien to the gun culture. They are unfamiliar with rural America and look down on it’s people as yokels aqnd hayseeds. However, in rural America, guns are part of life and people are responsible in handling them. The sound of the gun is not far away in hunting season.

If the only enforceable rights we have are those not abused by people in our ghettos, what rights will we have left?

I live in the outer suburbs of Philadelphia. . There is practically no gun violence in my suburban town or the towns surrounding it. It teems in Philadelphia. I cannot turn on the news without endless stories of Black urban murders, robberies and arsons.

I have a permit to carry a concealed firearm. I rarely carry my weapon in my environment but always do when I go into the city. Apart from the news reports and the voluminous reports of victimization of my neighbors by urban Blacks, I carry in the city because as a former law enforcement officer, I can read that environment with a practiced eye and see what is not so obvious to civilians.

Mr. Frum may wish to direct our attention away from the obvious racial element to gun crime but we who live near ghettos cannot afford his direction. At some point society must stand for the protection of the functional, law abiding citizens over those who choose to live in other ways. No amount of firearms restriction on the majority of Americans will have an impact on Black Americans tendency to shoot one another.

So an even that occurs less than .0016% of our public schools most often committed by whites and which seems to be in decline has fomented a conversation about how to manage black people and their guns.

So it takes white people killing white people to address the gun violence that exists in urban communities.

I doubt there’s a ny reason to do anything about guns. But it’s interesting to know that if you want to advance legislation on the matter — more white people need to kill in more white people in a manner that is on the decrease and impacts less .05% of the circumstances involved, even if it means white people killing or shooting at white presidents —

odd manner to take up legislation. Better yet to have it advanced by a kind a sorta black/white guy, Whose mother thought the country was so askewed about color, she raised raised him out of the country in which he would some day be called the fisrt black president — so he would advance legislation to corral the most corralled segment of the population in its history.

About those “reactionary South Africans”, I guess when one suffers from one of the highest murder rates in the world, I would rather be a reactionary than someone like this author who comfortably pontificates from his ivory tower.

“but it’s a mentality more in line with the most reactionary white South Africans than your average American gun owner.”

Did you ever see the movie “Disgrace” based on the novel that won J.M. Coetzee the Nobel Prize for Literature about an unarmed South African college professor, played by John Malkovich, whose daughter is gang-raped?